Chapter 36
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
RYAN
I pace my house like a caged animal as memories keep surfacing, unbidden and unwelcome, of the friend I thought I had. He called me his brother. I thought of him as such. I believed in it the way you believe in things that have never given you a reason to doubt them.
I was wrong about all of it. The thoughts keep circling back to the same point, the same sick drop in my stomach.
I talked about her. The day they met. I talked about the girl from 3A when I was at breakfast with Asher.
And from that, he used her, and I spent two years watching their marriage and believing in it.
I keep rolling it all over in my head, trying to decide what to do.
And then I realize the only viable option is to say all of this out loud to the person who knows her best. So I go to Jamie's.
She takes one look at me when she opens the door and steps back without a word, which tells me everything I need to know about how I look.
"I need a drink first," I say. "You're going to want one, too."
She doesn't argue. She pours two glasses of whiskey, neat, and we take them out to her deck and stand by the railing. The sun is going down, the sky bleeding orange and gold over the rooftops, and under any other circumstances it would be beautiful. Right now it just looks like something ending.
I take a long drink and let the burn settle before I speak. "I went to see Asher."
"I take it by the look on your face things did not go well," she says.
"Far from it. It was bad, Jamie. Really, really bad." I turn the glass in my hands. "He's a sociopath. I don't mean that loosely. I mean I stood in his office and watched him tell me he never loved her, and there was nothing behind his eyes. No guilt, no grief. Just calculation."
She goes very still. I tell her everything and watch her expression move through disbelief and fury and something that looks almost like grief as I do. By the time I'm done, she's white as a sheet.
"He's a fucking monster," she whispers.
"I know."
"We have to tell her."
"I know." I set my glass down on the ledge.
"But how? What do I even say? 'Hey Julie, your entire relationship was engineered from the beginning.
Your husband never loved you. He targeted you specifically because I talked about you, and that told him you were exactly the kind of woman his father would approve of. ' How does that not destroy her?"
Jamie sets her glass down too. "She needs to know. Whatever it costs, she needs to know."
"I'm terrified she's going to hate me for it."
"Why would she hate you?"
"Because I'm the reason he found her. If I'd kept my mouth shut, if I'd never mentioned her, he never would have looked twice. He would have found someone else to use, and she would have been safe." The words taste like ash. "I handed her to him."
She shakes her head. “No. That’s bullshit. I’m fucking furious he did this to my sister. Furious. But let me be clear about one thing: his actions aren’t on you. He would have found another woman and done the exact same thing to her. This is who he is, Ryan. You didn't make him this way."
I want to believe that. I'm trying to. But the logic keeps slipping through my fingers every time I get close to holding it.
“But if I hadn’t talked about her?—”
I stop talking when I hear a sound behind us. We both turn at the same moment, and Julie is standing there. She's in jeans and an oversized sweater, the sleeves pulled down over her hands, her hair twisted up in a loose bun that's coming apart at the sides.
She looks like someone who is holding herself together through sheer stubbornness.
"I saw Ryan’s truck down in the parking lot. I figured you guys were out here having a drink. So I used my key," Julie says. Her voice is quiet. "I've been here for a few minutes. I heard..." She stops. Swallows. “I heard everything."
I open my mouth and close it again. There is nothing to say that isn't inadequate.
"Is it true?" she asks. "About the accident?"
"Yes."
"All of it?"
"Yes."
I watch her shoulders rise and fall with the effort of breathing through it. I don't move. I don't think Jamie moves either. The whole deck feels like it's holding its breath.
"I knew something was wrong," Julie says finally, her voice cracking on the last word. "I knew he was lying. I just didn't know how much."
She looks at me, and her eyes are full of tears she's refusing to let fall, her expression something I don't have a specific word for. Just a jumble of grief and fury and a terrible, exhausted clarity all at once.
"He never loved me. That's what he told you. That he never loved me at all. It was all a lie, from the very first minute. There was never a bit of truth to it. To him.”
It isn't a question. I nod my head anyway. She absorbs that in silence. I watch her do it, watch her fit the shape of it into the space where her marriage used to be, and I feel like such a failure for believing in him. Two years of watching them together, two years of thinking that he loved her.
Julie crosses the deck and wraps her arms around me, and I freeze for half a second before I hug her back, careful at first and then tighter, because she deserves someone to hold on to.
"Thank you," she says, her voice muffled against my shoulder. "Thank you for not covering for him."
“Never,” I tell her as I hug her tighter. "I'm sorry it took me so long to confront him. I should have pushed harder, I should have seen it sooner."
She pulls back and looks up at me. "You couldn't have known. He's been lying to everyone for years— for a lifetime, it sounds like, actually— and he's very good at it.”
Something sharpens in her expression then, something that cuts through the grief and lands somewhere firmer. "But I need you to hear this, Ryan. Asher was wrong about one thing. I will never blame you for this. Not for any of it. I blame him, and only him."
My throat tightens to the point where speaking feels dangerous.
"I mean it." Her voice is firm beneath the grief, solid in a way that surprises me.
"You didn't do this to me. He did. I'm going to need some time to figure out what comes next, but I'm grateful. I'm truly grateful that I know. I’m grateful that it’s done and I no longer have to spend every day doing mental gymnastics trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong.”
I nod, because I don't trust myself to do anything more than that.
She takes a shaky breath and turns toward Jamie, who steps forward immediately and takes her hand, and I recognize the shift, the way the two of them close into each other the way they must have done a thousand times.
“I’m going to go," I say. "Give you two some time. But whatever you need, I’m here. Day or night.”
"Thank you, Ryan," Julie says quietly, and the way she says it carries more weight than the words themselves.
Now that she knows the truth, she can fight back. And I’ll be there for her in whatever way she needs me. No matter what.